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Jaylen Brown bids farewell to Boston in heartfelt social media post originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston

Jaylen Brown has spoken.

On Thursday, one day after being traded to the Philadelphia 76ers, the former Boston Celtics superstar took to social media with an official goodbye to the city he has called home for the last 10 years.

Read the full statement below:

First and foremost, thank you to the most high, even in the midst of adversity. I’m here with gratitude

I”m still processing how this all went down. I’m excited and disappointed at the same time. I earned my respect from this city. I never asked for shortcuts or special treatment. I simply showed up every day, put my head down, and accepted every challenge.

The relationships I built here, the battles we fought together, the championship we brought to this city, and the connection I shared with the fans, I’ll carry on with me.

Saying goodbye isn’t easy when you’ve invested your heart into something.

I’m big on respect and actions speak louder than words. To the people of Boston, thank you. To the community I built here I love you, and to the shiftaz we are locked in for life.

As one chapter closes, another begins.

I’m excited for what’s ahead and grateful for the opportunity to join Philadelphia. Every city has its own identity, its own passion, and its own expectation. I respect that, and I’m looking forward to earning that respect the only way I know how – through the work.

PHILLY #THROWTHEBALLUP LET’S GET IT!

The Celtics selected Brown with the third overall pick in the 2016 NBA Draft. The 29-year-old developed into an All-NBA talent alongside co-star Jayson Tatum, leading Boston to six Eastern Conference Finals appearances, two NBA Finals berths, and one championship. He was named MVP of the 2024 East Finals vs. the Indiana Pacers and the NBA Finals against the Dallas Mavericks.

In this year’s playoffs, the Sixers erased a 3-1 series deficit to defeat Brown and the Celtics in the first round. Now, Philly will include Brown in a loaded projected starting lineup that also features Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, Dean Wade, and Joel Embiid.

Boston received Paul George, two first-round picks, and two second-rounders from Philly in exchange for Brown.

I have this thing happening to me. Every day I go to bed, and without fail, I always find myself waking up at around 4:30 to 5 a.m. Funny thing is, the stuff tends to work in waves; sometimes it disappears and stays that way for a month and I sleep uninterrupted nightly, then it might come back for a week, or two, or eight, or whatever. Must be about aging. Whatever.

I woke up earlier today and checked the time exactly at 5:00 am. There was a notification on the phone; it was Russell Richardson in the P&T Slack letting us boys know about the infamous Jaylen Brown trade.

I checked it, was surprised, couldn’t really believe it, but that was it. Turned to the other side of the bed to try and catch some more sleep till the alarm sounded around an hour later, fully knowing my destiny was not to earn a single extra second of unconscious rest. It’s always the same.

With all of our crew sleeping overseas, I tasked myself with covering the trade in the early morning here in Spain after reading a bunch about it to get the full picture of it. You can read about in my earlier post linked above. And if you read that little story, you know I cut it short of where I wanted it to go because I have to admit I was going to go overboard. Hence, this new (Part II?) post.

With the near-factual feeling across the NBA world regarding how unexpected and ridiculous and hilarious and nonsensical (so much so Brad Stevens extinguished his Instagram account) Boston’s decision to flip Brown — coming off his best NBA season — for a 36-year-old human and four dubious draft picks, it just hit me that while this was ludicrous, the truth is that we’ve been watching similar stuff unfold in front of our eyes for a full week and change.

So consider this post your “how does Brown’s deal affect the Knicks?” silly breakdown, only expanded to the full Eastern Conference and linked to the beaten-to-death concept of parity.

Too much has been written and said about the new NBA Parity Era. And hey, it might be true, because there have been eight different champions in eight consecutive years — including your reigning, defending, undisputed NBA Champions of the World, the New York Knicks. But also, hey, it might be just the damn whole lot of roster-building randomness the NBA is dealing with these days, isn’t it?

After nine days of offseason transactions, from the draft to the first two days of free agency, the Knicks are the only team that can claim to have something no other team in the Eastern Conference can confidently say: ridiculous continuity. Yes, New York has lost Mitchell Robinson (RIP) and has a bench featuring a whole lot of guards, one unproven forward, and… no centers at all. As I type this, pending further moves, it’s a reason for concern.

But the East, simply put, is utterly unrecognizable these days. You don’t need to come out of a ten-, five-, or two-year-long coma to spot the differences. Just a little week-long trip to a hospital without Wi-Fi could have your head spinning as you read this.

• Miami landed Giannis Antetokounmpo but lost Norman Powell and a bunch of rotation players.
• The Hornets followed by sending their two best players away in LaMelo Ball and Miles Bridges to the Western Conference, taking a step back and looking forward to a brighter future.
• Philadelphia answered the Heat’s blockbuster by acquiring Brown in the most shocking trade since Luka Doncic went to LA.
• Toronto brought Kawhi Leonard back, but sent two starters in Brandon Ingram and Grady Dick the other way.
• The Pistons have lost J Cole and could whiff on bringing Jalen Duren back, although even if they do, they are just going nowhere, so don’t worry.
• Indiana flew under the radar and was awful last season, but they will have Tyrese Haliburton back and nearly all of the roster that graced the 2025 NBA Finals.
• Cleveland is perhaps the closest to the Knicks in terms of staying the same, only they might have the biggest FA signing of the year coming their way in LeBron James.
• Atlanta, Orlando, and Chicago mostly stood pat but they don’t scare anybody.
• You already know Washington is my dark horse for ECF, but all they did was luck into the No. 1 pick.
• Then there’s the Nets.

In four words, it’s all a mess. That said…

Miami still needs to build half of its roster with pocket money. Philadelphia has one of the highest ceilings in the conference, but Joel Embiid’s health won’t hold, and we’ll see how the Maxey-Edgecome-Brown trifecta meshes. Toronto looks better defensively, but again, the chem might not be there for them to contend. Boston will be kinda good anyway, but they will lack the ultimate punch come killing time. The 2025 Pacers were a mirage. Cleveland is Cleveland. And the Pistons are the biggest lie in recent history.

The Knicks enter the season knowing exactly who they are. That doesn’t guarantee another trip to the Finals, but it’s a much better place to be than trying to build chemistry around another blockbuster trade coming off a championship.

But again, when it comes to parity, and while the reigning champs are the one team keeping the core together and running it back for the most part, it’s just impossible to bet on them against the field for the 2027 NBA title, given how much the league has changed in a matter of days. How can you expect any consistency when one whole damn conference has changed entirely, and the other one has done the same, as this business is a zero-sum game?

• If you don’t recognize the LA Lakers roster above, you’re not alone. It’s the same story out West. Los Angeles parlayed LeBron’s departure into literally $450 million, all of them spent in a 15-minute flurry of moves.
• The Timberwolves are putting all their money in a fun LaMelo-Ant backcourt that might equally win games or force Minny’s fans out of the arena out of frustration.
• The Blazers don’t have money for their coach or their G League team, but they just traded for Ja Morant.
• Phoenix is now linked to an awful person forever.
• The Clippers are back to where they belong in Los Angeles sports lore.
• Golden State might soon lose the G from its name.

Shouts out to the Thunder and the Spurs — even though they’ve made a few moves — for nearly keeping their squads together, barring blatant dumpings and hiring a rapper.

So with all of the above written, how does the NBA or any fan out there expect anything else than “parity” or, better said, just plain dumb randomness? Who can really predict the outcome of a system whose variables change massively from one iteration to the next?

And again, even if the same suspects and longest-running teams will always at least be considered to be in the picture once again—your Knicks, Spurs, Thunder—there is nothing you can really do if you’re dealing with 15 different, new teams every year. As Knicks fans, we know it from the inside. New York slowly started to put together a team to beat the Celtics (which they did a year ago), but ultimately didn’t even meet Boston on their way to the title, and now the C’s look nothing like they did in 2024.

The Wolves appeared to be locked into building a tank to stop the Nikola Jokic Nuggets (which they achieved), only now they have flipped their roster entirely, while Denver remains nearly the same. Get back in time, and you’d find the Rockets attempting to build the anti-KD-GSW machine, only for Durant to bolt out after the 2019 title. The Big 3 Celtics (for the young lads, the ones featuring Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen) were built for countering LeBron James before he even moved out of Cleveland to form his own Voltron in Miami.

Who’s to say how the Eastern Conference picture will look come April? If you ask me this very minute (I have scheduled this story to publish five hours from now, who knows how the picture will look by that time…), this might be it compared to how things were by June 15 (not a per-se standings table, just a perception).

Long story short, you can plan and make moves for the present, but as is the case with our brains and attention spans, rosters are so much in flux and long-term planning is shrinking into a yearly affair that it just doesn’t make any sense to think more than two springs ahead. You can keep your team together (good), but you can plan for chaos elsewhere. And even if you get better or worse, there are still a thousand pieces moving around and out of your control that can swing your position up or down in the table at a moment’s notice.

These days, the League looks like a snow globe in the hands of a wicked two-year-old with erratic hand-shaking tendencies.

Parity, randomness… who cares? It will all have changed again before you close this page.

In order to understand the Jaylen Brown trade, its associated outrage, the mass confusion about how little Boston got back and the surrounding circus about how good Jaylen Brown may or may not be, we need to talk about another (in)famous trade. 

On Wednesday, the Celtics sent Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers for Paul George and two future first-round picks. That is shockingly little for an All-NBA, Finals MVP and borderline face-of-the-franchise level player not even in his 30s. But before we talk about Brown, George, the Celtics, the 76ers, Brad Stevens, Bill Chisholm, any of them, we need to talk about, you guessed it, Luka Doncic. 

After the Luka trade, there were a lot of takes. Most of them the same (“this is the worst trade in NBA history”), though some of them were stupid or just intentionally clickbaity (“the Mavericks won the trade”). But the best one, by far, was the nuanced counterpoint, made memorably (to me at least) by Chuck Klosterman. Loosely paraphrased: If you thought that that trade meant you could win the NBA Finals this year, then you can rationalize it. It’s not necessarily a correct diagnosis of your situation, but it would be a rational decision.

That is, to date, the only contrarian opinion on the Luka trade that I felt actually was fair to the parties involved. Every other formulation of “the Mavericks were going nowhere with Luka” or “defense wins championships” was either in bad faith or simply naive. But the view that treated Nico Harrison and the Mavericks as rational actors rather than visionaries or idiots was my favorite. 

The same may, eventually, be true for the Jaylen Brown trade: the return did not line up with his reputation, no, but it is likely that the Celtics made a rational decision based on their evaluation of the player and the market. And while the return is disappointing, arguably shocking, for Celtics fans (myself included), the trade should not be treated as patently insane. 

There are three possible explanations for why Boston pulled the trigger on such a flabbergasting lowball return: first, that Brown had demanded a trade and the two sides’ relationship had soured beyond the point of no return. This story has been repeatedly debunked by those with information from inside the Celtics organization. Second, that new owner Bill Chisholm is cost-cutting in order to make the team more profitable for his private equity partners. And while the influence of private equity in sports is a fascinating tale to tell, this version of events is an unnecessary and unlikely conspiracy theory; Boston offered Brown for Giannis Antetokounmpo, a player they would have immediately signed to an extension that would have exceeded the remaining value on Brown’s deal. Total team cost is not the reason.

That leaves reason number three, essentially the only one that makes any sense if we’re trying to be rational: the Celtics and Brad Stevens had decided, at some point in the past year, that it was impossible to win another championship paying Jaylen Brown a supermax contract. 

As was a topic of serious discussion on social media this week, Brown’s advanced metrics suggest he is an inefficient player whose team actually performs better when he is off the court. And while this is an impossibly prickly debate to wade into, let’s just skip the wading, put on a hazmat suit and cannonball in.

Jaylen Brown has been a winning player in his career. The Celtics have won an absurd number of games this decade. He was instrumental to their run to win the 2024 NBA Championship, and will perhaps be the last man ever to wear number seven in Boston. He has also been a frustrating player to watch and to root for. His persistent issues with clumsy dribbling seemed to create problems for the Celtics out of thin air. His free throw shooting, which majorly improved the last two seasons, is still below 75 percent for his career. But he has declined as a three-point shooter and has never been especially efficient from the floor. None of that is contradictory; Brown is incredibly talented and has been very successful — he is also not Jayson Tatum, the Celtics’ utterly non-negotiable cornerstone, nor are the two on the same level. 

Delusions that Tatum and Brown were somehow 1A and 1B (or even equals) rather than the clear number one and number two that they actually are, have pervaded Celtics circles since I was a small child. These delusions are what led to the most vitriolic outrage from Celtics Land on Wednesday, but there is no doubt that Brown is a better player than what he was traded for; George is an aging, injury-prone wing with a similarly expensive albeit shorter contract. Even if Boston had long decided to deal Brown, why the Celtics decided to make this move now rather than wait for something better is perplexing. But it is also possible nothing better would ever become available; without a full understanding of the market, we can’t be sure.

Tatum is a supermax player, and he will remain as such for the Celtics into the future. Most likely, the Celtics front office concluded that Brown’s supermax contract made it impossible for them to realistically compete in the next three years. Yes, they won a title with both Tatum and Brown, but that was before they were both on mega-deals and with a once-in-a-generation superteam Boston quickly became unable to pay. It is not feasible for the Celtics to put that kind of talent around Tatum and Brown ever again.  

That meant trading Brown was rational, something I have repeatedly stated on various internet publishing platforms since what feels like the dawn of time but is actually just, like, last May. And even though Brown is an excellent basketball player, the contract appears to have prohibited any real market from emerging. Even I underestimated how little the Celtics and the rest of the NBA thought of Brown as an asset. 

Boston did not wind up with Antetokounmpo because the Milwaukee Bucks did not see a team built around Jaylen Brown as a viable path to contention, now or in the future. Nor did the rest of the NBA, as Brown will now be second or third option on the 76ers behind Tyrese Maxey and maybe Joel Embiid. His reputation was, and should continue to be, far greater than what the Celtics got in return. But the simple reality that he makes too much money for what he actually contributes is probably the straw that broke the camel’s back.

There may be another straw. We will probably get some kind of now-they-tell-us feature story that describes how the front office slowly became disenchanted with Brown and how their relationship frayed. There may be some organizational policy that is not public information, but I will not speculate. And you can read all about why the George-plus-two-picks deal is so lopsided for Philadelphia here by the meritorious Ricky O’Donnell. I’m not here to tell you it’s a good deal.

I’m just here to say that it is, for the most part, a rational decision. We may be tempted to think that teams and players are two individuals, relating on an even playing field with emotions and attachment and associated respect. But teams are not individuals; they are groups, with complex interests and longer-term priorities. Whatever “responsibilities” they have to certain players, fans or to a city often break at the stone of cold logic. It’s not pretty, but trading Jaylen Brown for a pittance may still have been the best, or only, path forward. This is not the Luka trade, which had no bidding war. This trade was the result of the bidding war, and probably reflected his actual market value.

In the end, Brown’s contract may just be too expensive. Paying for past performance is the recipe for NBA disaster, especially in the most restrictive financial ecosystem the league has ever had. It is a bold statement, one I’m not necessarily sure I would make myself, but if Boston had truly decided that Brown was blocking their ability to build a winning team, trading him for the best offer they had, however insultingly low, makes rational sense.